Dear Janus, Earth Angel and Poet:

You asked for my advice regarding your elevated anxiety. Get more sleep of course, most important. Lack of sleep elevates anxiety.

But I have something else for you, it is in response to what you wrote in your most recent post: “I feel more like a human doing fighting my dysphoria… I feel so tired of consistently trying to fight myself... fighting myself is straining”-

– stop fighting yourself, is my advice.

Thing is, I don’t think you are fighting your dysphoria. I think that you are fighting your body. Fighting against your dysphoria would have meant aiming at no longer fighting against your body.

Every day you wake up hating your body, fighting against it, and every day you are losing that fight. I have no  problem with you appearing male, feeling male, expressing yourself male, identifying yourself male, planning of a future transitioning (following a lengthy and thorough counseling and research), but I do have a problem with the following: every day you wake up you are fighting against your body, against the biological gender you were born with. It is draining you.

I am suggesting that you entertain the following thinking: postpone your gender dysphoria thoughts and activities best you can until you are in a financial position to get that counseling and transitioning you are planning on having. Make peace with your biological gender as is because you can’t change it (until you are in a financial position to transition).

In other words, you are in a daily impossible position: you are in war against your biological gender with ZERO chances of winning.

Postpone the war until  such time that you have a chance to win this war.

Dress as you wish, keep your hair shot, exercise in moderation, and accept your biological gender for now, because there it is, every hour, every day, every night, to stay for a long time, until transitioning is possible for you.

Accept it, radically accept it.

anita